Teaming Up: Part 2/3 – Sponsorship
Compared to many other sports that operate a similar system of patronage between manufacturers and athletes, skydiving is relatively small. Even if you sell yourself brilliantly right from the start, the big goal of free stuff is not something that happens straight away. You are going to have to work for it. Wait! Work for […]
Teaming Up: Part 1/3 – Getting Started
Looking back across a season of high profile competitions and seeing professional teams across many different disciplines throw down their best performances can have a powerful effect on the imagination. The pull towards the ziggurat of organised competition can be strong – but what you ultimately witness is the end product of a lot of […]
Learning About Weather: Part 1/4 – Introduction
There is a lot to learn across your career as a skydiver. Expanding one’s brain is a process the starts right from the blocks and, if you are doing it right, never stops. Along the way, there are things that you have to know in order to progress through to new levels and ratings, yet […]
Learning About Weather: Part 2/4 – The Big Picture
From the solar flares and zooming photons of a gargantuan ball of always exploding fire really far away, through to the moon swinging about in the sky or even the rotation of the earth itself – the weather which makes or breaks our plans on this little blue and green planet is affected by things […]
Learning About Weather: Part 3/4 – Upgrade Your Grey Matter
There are lots of things you can learn about on the Dropzone that will aid you understanding of how all the elements involved in a skydiving operation fit together to make things work. Even just focusing on the assessment of the jumping conditions demonstrates several moving parts that all need to operate effectively to function […]
Learning About Weather: Part 4/4 – The Small Picture
It is easy to think of the weather as just being big. All too often as skydivers we assess things in very general terms without really worrying too much about the details – yet the most direct impact weather conditions can have on your skydiving can happen on an entirely personal level, affecting you and […]
Indoors Outdoors Part Six: Wrapping Things Up
Before you have invested the considerable time and effort to persuade your brain how to understand freefly properly it can all feel rather difficult. Witnessing highly accomplished flying in both the sky and the tunnel appears akin to magic, and the road to being able to do all that stuff yourself can seem very long […]
Teaming Up: Part 3/3 – Getting Stuff Done
Skydivers are a diverse bunch, drawn to the sky from across the length and breadth of human endeavour – and we each bring with us into any group dynamic a particular set of strengths and weaknesses. Across the different available disciplines teams are very different beasts, from the fairly compact pair of people that make […]